Mad penguins: the David Walsh theory of evolution

Multimillionaire gambling polymath
David Walsh
says he has stumbled across the answer to an important evolutionary puzzle: why species produce surprisingly high numbers of unpredictable risk-takers who embark on irrational behaviour. They are the mad scientists, odd-ball inventors, and unduly confident entrepreneurs who apportion their time very differently to the rest of us.

Walsh, a mathematician and computer programmer who spent more than $150 million creating the acclaimed Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, coins this behavioural phenomenon “multi-modality". Think of a bell curve with two humps, or a “dumbbell," he says.

Are these exceptions merely the random human outputs that one would statistically expect to find in the low-probability “tails" of any normal bell curve, or are they an artefact of a much more deliberate evolutionary approach that helps species adapt to change? Put another way, has the intersection of time and biology conditioned us to manufacture specific quantities of innovators and free-thinking iconoclasts that disrupt the status quo and progress our way of life in unprecedented ways?

David Walsh has taken hundreds of millions of dollars away from casinos and gambling venues and reinvested into an internationally important museum that has become Tasmania’s premier tourist destination.
Photo: Scott Gelston

While this is ultimately an empirical question, it is certainly interesting to consider.

Who would have thought that MONA, one of the world’s most-expensive and thought-provoking contemporary art museums, would be established by a professional gambler in one of the remotest locations on earth?

An island city with only half a million people that promotes itself as “the gateway to Antarctica".

“Social misfits like me – I was an incredibly introverted university dropout with poor communication skills – often end up outcasts or outsiders without other options," Walsh says.

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With the benefit of hindsight . . .

“With the benefit of hindsight I look to have made good choices – yet they were actually extremely bad – or low probability – judged by the simple application of mathematics.

“But they increased my exposure to the possibility of high-risk outcomes with substantial pay-offs."

And there is a case that the one David Walsh who did prevail – where many others who took similar paths with similar skills failed – has yielded broader benefits.

Walsh has, after all, taken hundreds of millions of dollars away from casinos and gambling venues and reinvested most of this wealth into a heterodox yet also internationally important museum that has become Tasmania’s premier tourist destination.

“I went to Antarctica once and there are penguins hundreds of kilometres inland from the main colonies on the coast that have been there for tens of thousands of years," Walsh says.

“Why did they make that journey? It turns out that penguin colonies are stable, but not completely so. There are climate change, sea-level change, statistically unlikely weather systems and other events that can every now and again wipe them out."

Really random exploratory things

“If they just lived in one colony eventually all of them would perish. So a small percentage go off and do really random exploratory things."

Walsh says that, like the bulk of entrepreneurs who go bust, “the vast majority of these crazy penguins perish".

“But every now and again one of these maniacs meets another maniac and starts a new colony. And while most of these die out, those colonies that survive look to do so with the frequency that exceeds or equals the failure rate of established colonies."

He believes that society gains from this approach to the distribution of risk-taking preferences within a population.

“The correct mathematical solution is the dumbbell, where you apportion a big chunk of your resources to safe things, like doing accounting or medicine, and a smaller share of your intellectual resources or wealth to taking high-variance risks."

At the aggregate species level, we want most people committed to reliable work that furnishes the staple goods and services we require to survive.

At the same time we also prosper from a reasonable share of mad penguins too: the small but significant number of Steve Jobs – and the many ghosts of Steve Jobs who never succeed – to drive change and eventually transform the way we live.